EXOTIC DANCERS
(C)1999 Alan M. Schwartz
The sublime hurdle for US visual media is the innocuous toss of
naked female anatomy and grisly tortured flesh into high concept
vehicles. "National Geographic" is forever keen on unclad female
natives of colour. Public TV bares dancers as culture and splays
butchered meat as educational medical documentaries. Reporters
(standing) or journalists (sitting) insinuating sex or gore sans
FCC or Christ-besotted moralist censure are aiming for Pulitzer
Prizes. What sits on the loading dock patiently waiting to be
unwrapped?
The 1997 star attraction was necrotizing fasciitis courtesy of
rogue streptococcus A bacteria. A centimeter/hour of living meat
is ravaged, necessitating radical tissue ablation or outright
surgical amputation and hideous deformity thereafter. The rarity
of this pathology and its ghastly latinate nomenclature mitigated
against prolonged Media celebrity.
Of all the various kinds of microorganic life for whom you do not
wish to be designated lunch, mycobacteria hover near the top of
the list. They are slow growing but relentless, resistant to
antibiotics, and marvelously arcane in the eventual destruction
of their host. Mycobacterium tuberculosis awards you tubercles
and caseous necrosis, bloodily killing you by inches over years
and decades. Mycobacterium leprae invokes leprosy's revulsion
(politically rehabilitated as Hanson's disease). Between the
Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, slopping over into Australia and
Mexico, rages Mycobacterium ulcerans and Buruli ulcer.
Buruli ulcer eats away chunks of flesh the size of footballs.
Take your pick of American, soccer, or rugby gear. The substance
of your body necroses in deep, giant crimson surface erosions
like a fanged monster chomping mouthfuls of flesh and muscle, but
you do not die. You recover as a crippled monstrosity. No
antibiotic stops it. It is the third most common mycobacterial
disease in 30 countries.
Uninventive bacteria, diphtheria or tetanus, secrete
proteinaceous toxins that can be met with antitoxins (serum
antibodies grown in large victimized animals). Buruli ulcer is
massive volumetric cellular destruction promoted by mycolactone,
the first lipid polyketonide bacterial toxin. There is no
stopping it except by physically removing it. Cavernous livid
ulcers erode even through bone, making for lovely pictures on the
10 o'clock news as the host is fully awake and photogenically
scared to death.
Buruli ulcer incubation periods can be years. When mycolactone
is secreted and diffuses tissue devastation initiates, and only a
burly surgeon with a sharpened back hoe can excavate enough meat
to purge it all. Reconstructive and plastic surgery prognoses
offer neither functional nor cosmetic optimism. The Net is rich
with color closeups.
Buruli ulcer was discovered in 1897 in the present territory of
Uganda; Mycobacterium ulcerans was reported as the etiologic
agent 50 years later and a quarter planet away.
J. Pathol. Bacteriol. 60 93 (1948)
Am. J. Trop. Med. Hyg. 23 919 (1974)
Clin. Microbiol. Rev. 5 1 (1992)
Trans. R. Soc. Trop. Med. Hyg. 83 410-413 (1987)
Trans. R. Soc. Trop. Med. Hyg. 87: 644-645 (1991)
Int. J. Dermatol. 1 25-26 (1992)
J. Clin. Microbiol. 33 2250 (1995)
We all harbor an emotional soft spot for koala bears. They are
vectors for Mycobacterium ulcerans, as are opossums; as are 1.5
million Mexicans illegally entering the United States each year
Officially rich with drug-resistant tuberculosis. Get ready for
Buruli ulcer and politically useful national panic, you pitiful
laymen sponges for Official truth.
Patience affords wicked terrorist urban warfare possibilities,
perpetrators being long departed when the magic twanger is
finally plucked. The isolated genetic cassette for polketonide
synthesis in fungi is the subject of intense manipulation and
recombinate DNA expression for combinatorial macrolide antibiotic
research. Gene-geneering an E. coli to dissolve your guts with
mycolactone, creating a human pandemic plague of unimaginable
proportions, is within the scope of an honors undergraduate
project. Skin bacteria, as in acne and boils, suggest themselves
as alternate vectors. Survivors here would be massively,
permanently disfigured and crippled (other-abled). Buruli ulcer
especially likes eyes and breasts.
What has fomented an explosively growing worldwide occurrence of
Buruli ulcer? Mycobacteria ulcerans is particularly adept at
exploiting semi-treated recycled water systems, as in retooled
large scale ecological public irrigations like golf courses and
parks. "Controlled" (inadequate) chlorination to eliminate
nugatory Official carcinogenicities of halomethanes is
particularly kind to the organism. Environmentalism has lived up
to its credo of expensive, shoddy, and deadly once again -
redoubled in trump.
What will transpire? A lot of innocent taxpayers will lose
literal pounds of flesh, the Media will pounce in full color,
Washington will be enraptured with a hideously expensive national
War on Buruli Ulcer, the EPA will pillage and rape with abandon -
for our own good. This is something way too good to let slip.
You heard it here first, folks. Save our children!